Post by Kiwi Frontline on Jan 30, 2019 4:19:12 GMT 12
Northern Advocate 30/1/19
TOO ROSY A PICTURE OF MAORI CULTURE
Marie Kaire paints a rosy picture of Maori culture (Letters January 19). But the fact is pre-European Maori culture included cannibalism, tribal warfare, slavery and female infanticide. These hunter gatherer people were responsible for the extinction of the Moa and approximately thirty other bird species, apparently many seal colonies around the coast were wiped out. Somewhere between a third and a half of New Zealand’s original forest cover was destroyed by these ‘original conservationists’.
She maintains they are the richest in cultural beliefs and still practice their pre-European belief in conservation today, if so heaven help us.
Seafood stocks, resource usage and pollution are under pressure but we now have 4.8 million people in New Zealand not the relatively miniscule 150,000 (approx) of the 18th century.
Maori arrived here from elsewhere approx five hundred years before Europeans, and apparently when they die their spirits leave for Hawaiki from Cape Reinga – so are they really indigenous as Ms Kaire asserts?
Lastly, she opines Maori are rich in language – and so they should be as this costs the ‘greedy commercialising’ NZ taxpayer around $600 million per year.
GEOFF PARKER, Whangarei
sites.google.com/site/kiwifrontline/letters-submitted-to-newspapers
TOO ROSY A PICTURE OF MAORI CULTURE
Marie Kaire paints a rosy picture of Maori culture (Letters January 19). But the fact is pre-European Maori culture included cannibalism, tribal warfare, slavery and female infanticide. These hunter gatherer people were responsible for the extinction of the Moa and approximately thirty other bird species, apparently many seal colonies around the coast were wiped out. Somewhere between a third and a half of New Zealand’s original forest cover was destroyed by these ‘original conservationists’.
She maintains they are the richest in cultural beliefs and still practice their pre-European belief in conservation today, if so heaven help us.
Seafood stocks, resource usage and pollution are under pressure but we now have 4.8 million people in New Zealand not the relatively miniscule 150,000 (approx) of the 18th century.
Maori arrived here from elsewhere approx five hundred years before Europeans, and apparently when they die their spirits leave for Hawaiki from Cape Reinga – so are they really indigenous as Ms Kaire asserts?
Lastly, she opines Maori are rich in language – and so they should be as this costs the ‘greedy commercialising’ NZ taxpayer around $600 million per year.
GEOFF PARKER, Whangarei
sites.google.com/site/kiwifrontline/letters-submitted-to-newspapers